Nearly 20 years after its launch, Internet2 is quietly humming along on university campuses across the country, doing its R&D work and connecting researchers who might otherwise not be able to share information so readily.

Contrary to any misinterpretations of the Internet2 mission statement, it was not intended to be a replacement or "new" Internet. And because it has been rather quiet lately, some people may have mistakenly figured it was dead.

Internet2 started out to improve bandwidth to research universities, but it evolved into offering a whole range of services, because if it stuck to just bringing high-speed networks to universities, once they had the high-speed networks, Internet2 would be irrelevant. So it branched out. And because of that, people lost track of what Internet2 was about.